I won’t waste space on the name of a man who was so small he couldn’t take the time to do this for a nation, but I thank the Bidens and the Harris-Emhoff family for giving the American people this. We’ve needed it.
I’ll be taking an extended lunch break tomorrow to watch the first woman being sworn in as vice-president and to watch adults take back control of the room.
My city remains on high alert. An entire town’s worth of military, 20,000+ troops, has been brought in to keep the peace and protect downtown. Helicopters have buzzed overhead constantly for days, with mobile command units parked a half mile up in the sky. Traffic is excluded from a record swath of the city, up to within a few blocks of my neighborhood.
Yet, as happens every year at this time, anti-choice protesters have come to complain that they should get to decide what women do with their bodies. Tonight they went up to the pizza place right-wing whackadoodles decided a few years back was home to a pedophilia ring. My neighbors met them with glasses of champagne and RuPaul and Lady GaGa played at such volume and dance moves so fly that the protesters were drowned out — and so discouraged that they had to leave:
It would only have been more D.C. if it had been Go-Go music.
May you find peace and encouragement as we move forward.
For my final Coffeeneuring ride of 2020, I headed back through Georgetown, but this time veered north, aiming for Glover Park and a new dining hall spot that had opened earlier this fall, Ghostline.
Their concept is that they have food from several different chefs and you can order it in one spot. Sort of like a food court, but classier and with high-quality food.
But en route I made a surprise stop — at a hot chocolate stand.
The boy running the stand had built it himself with entrepreneurial plans to run it three seasons, with lemonade, apple cider, and hot chocolate rotating out as the weather and supply dictated. He showed me with pride how he’d made the sign out of paper, so he could switch out what he was advertising. When I asked him what his schedule was, he told me that the day before he’d been waiting at the door when his mom (the sous chef in charge of making the cocoa) arrived home, but that today it had been a little later because he’d been forced to take a nap.
At $2 a cup and with the ability to have both marshmallows and whipped cream added to your drink for free, it would be hard to beat the economics of this stand, which was located on a corner lot by a bike lane.
After finishing my cup, I waved goodbye, wished him and his mom luck, and rode on.
Ghostline is across from the old Whole Foods and the baseball field in a row of other restaurants and small storefronts. There was a bike rack to lock up to, but I could see that getting crowded on a summer evening.
I was able to walk in and quickly place an order. I opted for a cup of tea and a vegan poptart, the latter of which is made by the people who ran Red Velvet Cupcake and Bakers and Baristas downtown, which I took across the street to the ball field. I sat at a picnic table and chatted with Rudi for a bit on the phone while I carefully avoided dripping raspberry jam down my front. So sweet, but also very good.
I briefly contemplated a stop at the grocery store a block away before deciding I was too tired and that I just wanted to go home. So I took myself the back way past the vice president’s house and pedaled home for the night, content with my season of Coffeeneuring rides.
Ride #6 of the 2020 Coffeeneuring season was to the coffee place with the best name, which is saying something since I’ve already visited a place called The Roasted Boon.
Harpeth Swill
1801 Wyoming Ave., N.W.
Saturday, Nov. 14, late afternoon
Conditions: Pleasant
Harpeth Swill has two locations in D.C. now. I went to the original location in Adams Morgan, which is also, I believe, where Sweet Science got its start.
Harpeth is the Tennessee river near where the founder grew up, which could potentially make the name slightly less interesting. But I argue that for a Southernesque coffee outfit, heavily invested in the Mason jar aesthetic, it still works. They are a cold-brew shop, which means they have put their fireplace and their counters to good use, as you can see in the shot above.
This year has just been a challenge for my getting out of the house early enough to do rides properly, so this was, once again, eked out just before closing time. (To be fair, everyone is also closing earlier this year, so it’s not entirely on me.)
I locked up to a street sign, because there were no bike racks on this section of block, but it is just across the street from a Cabi station, should you want to arrive via a borrowed ride.
I opted for a chai tea and a Whisked pretzel cowboy cookie, which I consumed on their patio in a rocking chair while reading. (They were technically closed by this point and this was the only furniture left.) It was probably closer to the sidewalk than I would have preferred, so I kept pulling my mask back on, but it worked for the half hour I was sitting there.
Sweet Science
35 N St., N.E.
Sunday, Nov. 8, afternoon Conditions: Pleasant
A week ago Sunday, it was a lovely day and I wanted to get in a slightly longer ride, so I decided to head to Sweet Science, which had opened back in January. This is where I was going when I ran across The Roasted Boon last month. It’s just as well I changed my plans; that day I had enough time to get to where I thought Sweet Science was, but not actually to where it is.
NoMa is sort of a created business district, built out of several older neighborhoods and comprising a historic area once known as Swampoodle. It’s north of Union Station, and includes Uline Arena (where the Beatles first played in the U.S. and now home to an REI), NPR’s new headquarters, Union Market, and Gallaudet University. Sweet Science is tucked into the very edge of the neighborhood, at the boundary of Near Northeast and Eckington.
When Rudi asked me where exactly Sweet Science was, I had a ready answer: on the block that ends at The Chicken and the Egg statues!
(It should be noted that neither photo does justice to the size of these statues. The utility box the chicken is standing on is about six feet tall, and the egg is at least ten feet tall.)
Anyway, back to my visit!
Sweet Science had some of the most interesting drinks I’d seen in a while and I ended up ordering a Goat Noir — steamed goat’s milk and dark chocolate sauce — which made for a very earthy (albeit less smooth than cow’s milk) hot chocolate. It reminded me of these amazing chocolate chèvre cheese balls one of the farmers at our local market introduced last Christmas. I paired it with a sweet potato biscuit and their homemade seasonal cranberry jam. Everything was delicious, and I’d easily recommend both. You could even buy a jar of their jam!
There was plenty of indoor seating, but outside you had to rely on benches. Luckily, there was a free one facing into a tree box and hemmed in on the street by a construction vehicle, which gave me the opportunity to turn my back to the sidewalk and eat and drink without feeling too vulnerable from others walking by in close proximity. With a number of bike racks on the block, I look forward to returning with Rudi once he’s back in town.
Saturday marked the combination of a beautiful day, the announcement that Joe Biden had clinched Pennsylvania’s Electoral College votes, and low demands on my time. However, I futzed around until too late in the day for a lot of coffee places, and then I had the double challenge of needing to be home for a video chat with friends.
As with nearly everywhere on M or Wisconsin in Georgetown, bike parking requires finding a street sign to lock up to. Unless, of course, like me, you forget your lock and don’t realize it until you arrive. Then you might consider asking a nice couple with their own bikes parked next to them to watch yours while you run in and order. I have literally never done that before, but Saturday seemed like a day to trust in the goodness of people.
It was a good day. I was awakened shortly before noon by pot banging in the neighborhood, which quickly escalated to cheers, horn honking, and, eventually fireworks. The emotion everywhere was jubilant and contagious and if we weren’t living amidst a pandemic might have involved strangers hugging.
I biked down to Black Lives Matter Plaza and the White House earlier tonight to see the crowd down there. You may have heard Trump built up the wall to “protect” himself; it just gave folks a bigger canvas. There was dancing and more fireworks and champagne bottles being popped and whole families out so kids could be a part of this historic day.
